Sunday, February 23, 2014

- That theft case from Vermont I mentioned last week took a surprising turn: Patrick J. Rooney, the accused thief, was found dead in his apartment; the death is being considered a suicide.

- There's a new website to highlight all the good things happening in New York City in early April: rarebookweek.org.

- From the BL's Medieval Manuscripts blog, "Hidden Away," a post on manuscript fragments recently found in the binding of a John Evelyn commonplace book.

- This morning's CBS Sunday Morning highlighted (with video) what may be the last newspaper in America being printed with linotype.

- Ruth Graham has a lengthy piece in the Boston Globe about the lure of the Voynich Manuscript for scholars, outlining some of the recently-unveiled theories (here's another one) and the skepticism which has greeted them.

Sunday, February 16, 2014

- A new theft case out of Vermont: Patrick J. Rooney, 55, of Colchester pleaded not guilty last month to charges that he stole a page from a 1791 volume of early Vermont records from Burlington's Fletcher Free Library and tried to sell it to UVM's Bailey-Howe Library. Following that discovery an investigation revealed that UVM had previously purchased other material from Rooney, including a volume of Chittenden County Road Commissioner records from 1828-1831 which UVM purchased in May 2013 for $625. Last week Rooney was charged with additional counts relating to the newly-discovered thefts, and he failed to appear for his arraignment on Thursday. Court records revealed that Rooney was linked to prior library thefts in 2001, 1994, and 1991. There's a photo of Rooney here, and the Burlington Police Department has posted a list of documents which may be linked. I'll keep an eye on this, but will appreciate any information others have on this story as well.

- Newly-released, the third volume of Galileo's O: A Galileo Forgery. It's available for pre-order on Amazon, but the text is also available online here as PDFs, which is absolutely fantastic to see.

- From David Whitesell on the UVA Special Collections blog Notes from Under Grounds, an excellent post on book (or manuscript) breaking for pleasure or profit.

- The finalists for the George Washington Book Prize have been announced: Alan Taylor's The Internal Enemy, Jeff Pasley's The First Presidential Contest, and Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy's The Men Who Lost America. The winner will be announced in May.

Sunday, February 02, 2014

- The BSA, Caxton Club, and the University of Wisconsin Libraries are hosting a symposium on 26 April, "Bibliography, Collections, and the History of Science." Speakers will include Michael Shank on stop-press corrections in early modern astronomy, Florence Hsia on Bodleian Librarian Thomas Hyde, and Nick Wilding on the Galileo forgeries. Worth noting: Richard Lan will speak during the afternoon session.

- New at The Appendix, a fascinating index to the published articles. If you're not already reading this great publication, you should remedy that right away.

- The University of Missouri has discovered that some 600,000 books in an offsite storage facility have been damaged by mold. More here from Jennifer Howard at The Chronicle.

- Over at Student Science, a look at the high-tech efforts being made to hunt for palimpsests in the texts housed at St. Catherine's monastery in Egypt.

- A manuscript leaf, one of a number stolen from the Archdiocese of Turin in 1990, has been returned to Italy.

- The Vatican Library and four Japanese historical institutions will work together to inventory, catalog, and digitize the Marega Papers, an archive of some 10,000 documents related to the persecution of Christians in Japan during the 17th-19th centuries.

- The BL has uploaded more than 15,000 images of Persian manuscripts from its collections.

- BookFinder.com has released its annual list of most-searched-for out-of-print books at BookFinder.

- I'm delighted to see that the New York Society Library has completed their cataloging of the John Sharp Collection. See their blog posts on the collection here and here.

- A guest post by Thijs Porck at medievalfragments, about scribal abuse in the middle ages.

- At The Junto, Roy Rogers explains his new shelving system for his personal library. Which reminds me, I meant to share the one I came up with for my own. Someday!

- A couple security alerts from the ABAA this week, mostly involving fraudulent credit card transactions. See the full reports here and here. The books are well described, so if you've seen them or recognize them, contact the ABAA Security Committee.

- UVA English professor Brad Pasanek is interviewed for the Ploughshares "People of the Book" series.

- Over at the MSU Provenance Blog, Adversaria, a copy of the 1688 edition of Dryden's Poems containing lots and lots of manuscript annotations and extra manuscript material on inserted leaves.

- At medievalfragments, Irene Daly notes M.R. James' work as a scholar of manuscripts and how that played into his ghost stories.

Reviews

- Valerie Martin's The Ghost of the Mary Celeste; review by John Vernon in the NYTimes.

About Me

Reviews of books old and new; news and commentary on book history, library culture, digital humanities, archives and related subjects. Written by Jeremy Dibbell, a bibliophile, haunter of used bookstores, and Director of Communications and Outreach for Rare Book School. Email: philobiblos@gmail.com.